From Managing People to Managing Processes - The Importance of Managing Processes in an Organization

Business Process Management is not a very enticing phrase, and when reading the phrase, your eyes might start to gloss over. Nevertheless, managing the processes in your multinational organization is just as important as managing your talent, if not more significant.

Your processes are the mechanisms that drive your company’s growth and help you reach your short and long-term business goals. In essence, your business is a powerful engine, and the processes are the tools that help you fine-tune it for maximum efficiency and productivity. But how do you manage these processes? Which processes do you manage and how do you know if they’re managed effectively? Are they really that important in the first place?

Why Business Process Management is Essential

Going back to the engine analogy, if you weren't to use the right tools to fine-tune your business, you wouldn't get very far in the long-term. Sure, you might be able to drive growth for a year or two, but if you want to keep up with the big players in your industry, everything must run smoothly.

Business Processes are a major component of this success, and if they're slow, inefficient, redundant, or unreliable, they cost your organization time and money in lost productivity. No matter what your business goals are, there is a process behind each of them to ensure that you hit your targets each month, quarter, and year. Whether your goal is as small as making sure that the monthly newsletter gets out on time or significant like reaching 4% in company growth this year, your company must ensure that the processes are up to par.

The Main Benefits

Increased Efficiency

When companies implement a process management program, one of the first things they notice is increased efficiency in many areas of the organization. It might not surprise you to learn that many business processes are plagued with waste. Waste comes from a variety of sources including manual effort and attention, a lack of effective process monitoring, and poor interdepartmental handoff. By shining a light on your processes and finding the areas of improvement you can eliminate inefficiencies and provide a boost to your bottom line.

Proven Effectiveness

After you’ve overhauled your processes to be more efficient, you can then turn your attention towards improving their effectiveness. With a more effective process, you can handle exceptions faster, make better, more informed decisions, and execute changes and strategies seamlessly. When business processes are closely aligned with corporate goals and strategies, many companies see gains in profit and improve their competitive standing in the marketplace.

Improved Agility

When thinking of company goals, becoming more agile might not be at the top of your list. Your company won’t be running any marathons anytime soon, so why would it need to be more agile? What I mean by “agility” is the ability to adapt to changing business environments and the competitive landscape quickly, without any hesitation or major hiccups.

Both inside and outside your organization, you are guaranteed to see sudden changes and your company should be ready to adapt at a moment's notice. Whether it means that a new business opportunity presents itself, your new partners or customers do business differently than you, or if new regulations at the State of Federal level change your processes, you need to be ready.

Reduced Risk

If you can successfully integrate a business process management initiative, you’ll be able to identify risks and blind spots in your organization. By putting tour business process down on paper or in a software platform, the step-by-step guide will show employees the “right” way of doing things. This will help reduce the risk of human error, while also showing areas that your processes ignore.

It’s a Step-by-Step Plan

Managing your business processes isn’t a one-time thing, and it isn’t as easy as purchasing a process management software or technology. In fact, you should never think that your processes are managed to the fullest. There is always room for improvement, and some of the largest companies on earth spend a significant amount of resources on continually optimizing their process management systems.

The first step of this plan is recognizing the problems your processes currently experience. Then you must work towards finding a solution that cuts waste and works towards a better system. This is a never-ending journey, and whether or not someone in the organization has “business process” in his or her title, process management should remain a priority.

Own Your Processes

At every level of your organization, your employees should own their processes. This means that they are responsible for updating and optimizing processes continually. No one person can handle all of this, so if you implement a process management system across the board, you can delegate process management and keep everything running smoothly.

Naturally, the people that should manage the processes are the ones that carry out the tasks daily. In other words, you shouldn’t make the marketing department responsible for the bookkeeping processes, and the HR department shouldn't be responsible for your customer acquisition processes.

Encourage Collaboration

Just because individual members own a process doesn't mean that they should keep it to themselves. After working with the same process for a period of time, many people become complacent, and they turn into the bottleneck. To overcome this, they should share their processes with other team members in their department. Two heads are better than one, and with everyone working with the same business process, they can identify areas for improvement and implement changes that could affect the entire company.

Summary

With effective business process management, you’ll be able to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and drive growth over the long-term. While managing people might seem like a priority, with the best processes in place, the processes and systems will manage the employees and ensure that every department in the organization works effectively. It might take some investment at first, but if you take the time to get your processes on track and keep them working, the initial time investment will be worth the benefits.